


A Week in the Life

by Mogseltof



Series: Prowl Week 2020 [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Ficlets, Gen, Gen Fic, Implied Relationships, M/M, One Word Prompts, Prowl Week 2020, continuity soup, with strong notes of g1 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:01:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23733514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mogseltof/pseuds/Mogseltof
Summary: Prowl Week 2020! One word prompts for each day, ficlets for each, all focused on Prowl. This fic contains the first five ficlets! Days 6 & 7 are part 2 and 3 of this series respectively!Crash. High. Law/Crime. Sensory. Command.There's a lot tocarefor in life, including yourself.
Relationships: Jazz/Optimus Prime/Prowl
Series: Prowl Week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1709491
Comments: 36
Kudos: 68
Collections: Prowl Week





	1. Crash

“This, for reference, is  _ exactly _ the reason we have internal speed limits,” says Prowl with disgust from the bottom of the pile up. He can hear Ironhide laughing from outside the crush and rattles his vents with the force of his sigh. 

“Sorry,” someone else pipes up, sounding rueful. Their fields are all mashed together, and the local network is an absolute mess of IDs so Prowl can’t immediately identify who says it.

“Well-I-mean-if-everyone-watched-where-they-were-going-“ That one however is definitely Blurr, and Prowl registers eight different “shut up” in his general direction.

“My hood’s crumpling!” someone says with no small amount of alarm, and there’s an ominous shifting sound. “I need to transform so I can—“

“NO!” yells Prowl, as loudly as he can. “Everyone who’s in alt needs to stay in alt or we’ll just—“

Too late. Metal screeches loudly as multiple people try to transform back to root mode with low to middling success and a lot of complaining. Prowl shifts from the bottom to somewhere in the middle of the crush. There’s more light at this angle, and he’s face to face with a sheepish looking Smokescreen. 

“You’re lucky I can’t hit you,” Prowl informs him, then raises his voice. “What did I say?”

He receives several pings and glyphs of apology in response. At least now he knows exactly who’s getting punishment details out of this. 

“I wonder if this happens over on the Nemesis?” says someone idly. The blue flashes accompanying it indicate it’s probably Wheeljack. Prowl doesn’t remember seeing him in the hall before this happened, and hopes to Primus that he wasn’t part of the racing group. 

There’s the sound of more laughter from outside the group, and the screeching of metal as the first few people are pulled out of the entangled puzzle they’ve become. It takes a while, and Prowl has an agonising moment where Hoist has to carefully disengage his back panels from Arcee’s back kibble, but they are eventually freed, and Prowl has his view of the sorry miscreants who’d caused the pile up. 

First Aid is grinning openly as he tries to unhook Blurr’s head gear from an impatient Hot Rod—they both look very uncomfortable and Prowl doesn’t feel an iota of sympathy for either of them. One of his back panels twinges with discomfort, and he shifts to glare at Arcee, who to her credit, manages to look totally unrepentant. 

It’s a matter of moments to access the current duty roster and assign extra patrol shifts to everyone in the corridor, and the laughter that was starting to ring out shifts to groans and complaining pings. 

“Hey,” says Ironhide indignantly. “One, I wasn’ even  _ involved _ , an’ two, you can’t give me punishment detail!”

“You laughed,” says Prowl, rotating his door in its socket as Blurr finally slides off the offending spoiler and hits the ground with a crash and a squeak, finally allowing Hot Rod to stand up properly. “Take it up with Optimus.”

“Just for the record, I’m also laughing,” says Optimus with no small amusement in his tone from where he’s standing in the doorway. 

Prowl blinks at him, left door flicking once more, and then he shrugs, assigning a patrol shift to Optimus’ name as well. 

The startled laughter follows him down the hallway as he continues on to his original destination. 


	2. High

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 2, prompt “High”

Oh. Oh this was awful. 

Prowl clutched the spire next to him and immediately shut off his visual input. It did nothing to stop the other alerts screaming at him about his geographical location, but the humans did it and like everyone else he’d sort of picked it up. Could a Cybertronian even get vertigo? Something to ask Ratchet if he was interested in a lecture once his internal balance systems stopped screaming. 

His long range comm unit beeped at him, and Prowl accepted the request to open lines without even checking the ID. If it was Decepticon then so fucking be it, because at least he’d be off this—

“Hey Prowl,” said Jazz in an altogether far too cheerful voice. “What’s your status?”

“I suppose I should be thankful,” said Prowl, gripping the spire more tightly and trying to ignore the ominous creaking noise. His scan had shown that it would hold him, though it probably wouldn’t be happy about it. “The fact that the Decepticon side has someone with Skywarp’s talent is horrifying, but it is thankfully mitigated by the fact that he feels the need to use it for things like this instead of anything worse.”

“...You know how many feet—“

“Yes! Yes I am aware of  _ exactly _ how many feet in the air I am right now thank you!” snapped Prowl quickly, his grip tightening. “Don’t  _ voice _ it, just get me down!”

“Roger,” said Jazz wryly. “Jus’ think about how much nicer it is to be here instead of being teleported into the middle of a wall. Nice breeze.”

“I hate you,” Prowl informed him. “Please tell me that you’re close.”

“We’re close. Mosta the aerials are outta commission so I grabbed Skyfire,” said Jazz in a soothing tone. “Figured you’d rather that over havin’ ya clinging to Fireflight all the way back. We set out as soon as we gotta lock on ya.”

“Thank Primus,” said Prowl. His instinct was to relax, but the instant he felt the cables in his fingers start to reflexively loosen he tensed up again. “How did you find me?”

Laughter crackled over the commline. “Yeah uh, we intercepted a human news report about a police cruiser dropping out of the sky and landing on the tallest skyscraper—“

“Oh good,” said Prowl, manually slowing the pace of his vents. “I’m so glad I have an audience for this.”

“Yeah well, s’just us now,” said Jazz, and air shifted, buzzing around him. “Open your eyes, we’re backing up for you.”

Prowl registered Skyfire’s heavy EM field hitting his, and this time he did relax, onlining his optic feed once more to see Jazz waving from the open ramp of the shuttle. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In honour of it being 20/4 i’m word of god’ing this 450 word fic to confirm that Skywarp is indeed Baked as Shit which is about 60% of why he thought this would be funny.


	3. Law/Crime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 3, prompt "Law/Crime"

“Jazz, do you have a second?” asked Prowl, glancing up as the others left the meeting. 

“Yeah mech, hit me up,” said Jazz, easing back into his chair as the door slid shut behind Ironhide. 

“I’ve been fielding a lot of reports of petty theft recently,” said Prowl, loading up the relevant files and pushing them across on their local network. 

Jazz nodded, accepting the files with barely a flicker. “You want me to take care ‘a some of it?” He asked, head tilting a little. “Told ya keepin’ track of the social state on board by handlin’ all the crew intrapersonal reports was a bad way to do it—ah.”

“You’ve noticed the commonality then?”

“That they’re all mechs I’ve fielded for my ops in the last few months? Mighta stuck out a little.” Jazz grinned widely at him, spinning in his chair a little and kicking his feet up on the table. “You tellin’ me everyone else on base is keepin’ a hold o’their shit just fine?”

“No, Tracks has also reported a theft this week, but he reports one every other week or so and no other divisions have a spike like this. I thought it was odd.”

Jazz held his hands out by his side, fingers spread, and wiggled them, still grinning. Of all the habits everyone had started picking up once they’d hit Earth-side, this one irritated Prowl the most, mostly because Jazz had found out what it was called and then insisted on doing it _all the fucking time_. 

“You got me,” he said, and Prowl almost missed the implication because he was distracted by the jazz hands.

“What?” he said after a beat. 

“You found the culprit,” said Jazz, lowering his hands and pinging him glyphs of amusement. “I thought you knew what I was doin’, sorry mech.”

“ _Why_ are you stealing from mechs who come under your command?” asked Prowl, resisting the urge to beat his head against the tabletop. (Speaking of bad habits picked up from humans.)

“Gotta keep ‘em on their toes,” said Jazz with a highly irritating amount of nonchalance. “They’re supposed to figure it out on their own an’ hit me up.”

“Your definition of ‘training exercise’ needs work,” Prowl informed him, climbing to his feet and sending the rest of the petty theft files across to him. “If you want to play this game, _you_ get to handle the reports for it.”

“Owe you a drink, Prowler!” called Jazz merrily at his repeating back, and Prowl responded with another human hand gesture over his shoulder. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...day 6 is shaping up like it's gonna get a fic on its own with day 7 RIP (I have no self control lmao)
> 
> I have a lot of Feelings about the differing ways Prowl and Jazz handle being in charge of people lol


	4. Sensory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 4, prompt "Sensory"

The rec room was loud. It was where everyone congregated to socialise and eat. It always had been, and it likely would be for a long time. So why in the Pit was Prowl finding it so hard to deal with?

Across the room a game of human poker was getting increasingly rowdy. He could hear the cursing of three different mechs, and if he focused he could probably tell what variant of the rules they were using. It was taking up seven different audial bands in his processor—another three were focused on the table of medical staff where Ratchet was enjoying some rare downtime and the fact he had zero patients at the current time. Two tables down Sunstreaker was starting to raise his voice as he argued with a gaggle of minibots, and he should probably intervene if they got any more out of hand. Just next to him Jazz and Ironhide were having a spirited debate about an Autobot collaboration with a human scientific team, and Wheeljack’s field indicated he was monitoring it more closely than Prowl, his fins flashing as he turned to join them, an officer conversation that he  _ should _ listen in on because it was bound to come up on the next shift handover, and in the far corner Bumblebee looked like he was trying to be sneaky with Hound, and there was an odd tilt to the way they were sitting that meant Mirage was probably there as well—

Metal scraped as someone sat down beside him, but he was delayed in registering it, head turning too slowly as he tried to manage every band of input, audial, optical, infrared (Mirage was barely a shimmer but he  _ was _ there), electromagnetic, glyph, pings, and all open communal comms. 

“Prowl,” said Optimus, soft but right in his audial receiver, overriding all the other input. “You’re spilling your energon, did you notice?”

Prowl blinked once then tilted his head down, the sensors in his hand finally reaching the top of his priority queue. His cube was tilted almost all the way over, and energon was coating his hand and dripping onto the tabletop. “Sorry,” he started to say, but it came out on three different frequencies, and Optimus covered his hand. 

Optimus had the best control over his EM field of anyone on the base, and he used it now. The Matrix gave it a deadening, alien feel, and Prowl could still identify the differences from the field Orion Pax had projected. It was just as comforting as Optimus used it now though, swamping his sensors, blocking out every other field Prowl was trying to process. 

“Look at your energon, and just focus on me,” said Optimus calmly. He started to recite the contents of the report Prowl had submitted at the end of his shift, familiar, and not exactly soothing, but very easy to listen to. He righted his energon again, and mechanically took a sip, logging each sensor node the liquid registered against. Slowly his processes returned to normal, and he sat there in their little bubble, trying to feel only one thing again, even as the world carried on just as loud around him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dissociation's a Bitch, understanding ppl are the best


	5. Command

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 5, prompt "Command". (This is the shippy one, lmao)

There is no point where all three of them have an off shift together; and that is by design. Either Optimus is on shift and commanding, or he’s off and Prowl is, or, rarely, both of them are off and Jazz has the reins. (Jazz prefers for this not to happen too often, and frankly, so does Prowl.)

After that point, it’s Ironhide (functional, but not good for long term), then Wheeljack (worse than Jazz), then Red Alert (strictly emergencies only). Technically Ratchet outranks Wheeljack, but medical is an essential function, so the CMO can never be the commanding officer on any Autobot ship, and the ARKIII is no exception. 

“I can hear your processor spinning,” says Optimus in a static laden voice, and his heavy hand rests over Prowl’s face plates, activating every pressure sensor in a way that’s far too soothing. 

“You’re not meant to be speaking,” Prowl reminds him, reaching up to pat his hand. “Nanites need to heal the vocaliser.”

::And your new server needs to integrate properly before you blow all the circuits worrying about things you can’t help,:: says Optimus, over internal comms instead of vocally. 

“Look,” says Jazz with irritation in his tone from the bottom of Optimus’ berth where he’s spread out in a way that looks highly uncomfortable. “I know Soundwave knocked out like all o’my receivers, but tha’ doesn’ mean y’can just have a conversation in front o’me an leave me outta it.”

::Sorry:: send Prowl and Optimus, one right after another, on the wider comm band and Jazz chuckles lowly in response, the sound ragged. 

Optimus’ berth is the only one that’s big enough for all three of them, which is also by design, even though they’re never in it together unless this has happened. Unless all three of them have been hurt badly enough for Ratchet to dig in and force them all to stand down and recover. It faintly horrifies Prowl to know that he can only have these moments when all three of them are in pain. He has so few social connections left now, and the ones he has onboard are very important, but Jazz and Optimus are the ones that crawl inside his processor and set up shop. 

There’s a clunking noise as his new server tries to engage to process this new strain of worry, and Jazz and Optimus both smack at him. 

::Stop that!:: scolds Optimus and;

“Hey!” snaps Jazz. His knuckles clank against Prowl’s knee, and Optimus’s hand on his face shifts to tug his helm close, finding the transformation seams at the back and stroking them softly. 

Prowl engages a line of code to murder the processing tree that’s started to bloom, and the clunking noise from his hip starts to subside. Optimus’ hands are shaky from exhaustion and stress, but gentle, and Jazz’s hand has moved to petting repeatedly. ::Ratchet said he’d have to put you out to let it integrate if you fragged it up, and you know it takes longer that way and spinning you back up puts you out of sorts.::

“I know,” says Prowl out loud, and Jazz taps his knee again sharply. ::Sorry. I know. I know.::

::As nice as it is to have you here, I can’t afford to have you out of commission that long,:: continues Optimus, his fingers still moving slowly. ::And it’s nicer when you’re well and safe.::

::I’ll be back in my office as soon as possible,:: says Prowl, pushing his field against Optimus’, too tired to try and regulate the emotion in it. 

Optimus’ fingers pause, and Prowl can hear the sound of air rattling through his vents on the far side. 

::Not wha’ he meant,:: says Jazz, knocking Prowl’s knee lightly again. ::Come on, I know you’re havin’ trouble righ’ now, but try an’ shut off for a bit, kay?::

Prowl’s not quite sure what he’s missed, but prodding at it threatens to engage the new server again, so he just shutters his optics and flicks affirmative pings at each of them. 

They’re silent for a moment, Prowl relaxing down at the feeling of hands activating his pressure sensors in his favourite way. The only sound is of their fans slowly spinning and the gentle hum of their most basic processes. Then Jazz starts laughng in a thready, wheezing noise. 

“What’s so funny?” asks Prowl, without thinking. 

Jazz doesn’t respond, because he can’t hear him. 

Prowl tries again. ::What’s funny?::

“Op can’ talk, i can’t hear or see, an’ you can’t think,” wheezes Jazz, glitching up an octave. “We’re the three monkeys.”

Prowl doesn’t get it, but it takes less than a second to access the nearest wireless internet receiver, and the same again for the search to log. The lack of processing power means that he’s halfway through Wikipedia articles about a boyband from the sixties, an animated band that appears to be half fiction, and a turn of the millenium English band before he realises that for once Jazz  _ isn’t  _ being incomprehensible because he’s talking about human music, and he goes back and adds some modifiers to his search. 

“Ah,” he says, out loud as the first image of the ape hiding his eyes registers. “I think Jazz has finally lost it.”

Optimus huffs a quiet laugh. “I thought it was funny,” he rumbles softly. 

“Y’better be praisin’ me up there,” Jazz tells them, finally shifting to drape across them more comfortably. 

::We’re talking about how best to fire you,:: sends Optimus, tonal modifiers totally deadpan. ::After I figure out how to keep Prowl on his mandatory bed rest.::

The power in the room cycles down and cuts out entirely, emergency lighting illuminating the walls lowly as the alert for a rolling lockdown across the ARK pops up on their shipwide notifications. 

::I promise I will complete my mandatory bed rest,  _ after _ I get back from ripping Red Alert’s processor out of his exhaust pipe,:: says Prowl, attempting to escape from the warm, pinning, hold Optimus and Jazz have on him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Paraxial: "Good, but also, is Optimus shooshpapping Prowl??"
> 
> Filthy homestuckery aside, it's official, day 6 is getting it's own fic, it's a long 'un.

**Author's Note:**

> I am posting late in the day because I'm Australian and time zones are the work of the devil. I've got the first five days prewritten so hand to god I will actually be completing this (I am notoriously terrible at following through on participation for fandom events). I wanted to set each fic in specific continuities but didn't start as early as I'd like due to uh, the world, and also delays re:campnano and my ofic serial, so instead we get this? It's like, the tasting dish of my big sandbox AU setting I'm working on except not quite. Look, basically I took different aspects of canon and looted it for things I liked before applying my own character interpretations, let's just try and roll with it. 
> 
> (See? I can write about Prowl without killing or maiming him. I TOLD YOU ALL AND I WAS _RIGHT_!)
> 
> Also it's my sister's birthday so this is dedicated to Eilish, who has no idea what Transformers is about, and will never read this fic. This author's note is a clusterfuck, I apologise.


End file.
